Release AVALANCHE: Spelunky, Papers, Guacamelee

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Are you ready to be positively buried under amazing games? Well too bad. Games are largely distributed via non-physical means now, and that’s a weird thing to do with them anyway. Take your sick, fetishistic disc orgies somewhere else. (Note: RPS does not actually discriminate against fetishes. Just physical media.) There are, however, a lot of brand new, positively excellent games suddenly populating our hobby’s infinitely expanding sea, and you should really just probably play all of them. I quite liked what I played of Papers, Please, the consolefolk enjoyed Guacamelee, and everybody with air in their lungs and a beating heart in their chest loves Spelunky.

All three have snazzy new trailers, so take off your reading glasses and put on your scrutinizing monocles:

I think I just want to write Spelunky poetry all day now. Can that be my job? Jim, can I just stop reporting game news and [No. – Ed].

Papers, Please is a fairly standard release from a features standpoint (it is, however, anything but in every other way; we’ll have more about the dystopic document thriller soon, but please please please just play it) while Spelunky and Guacamelee bring over a bevy of new bits and bobs served up all special-like for PC.

All three are out right now, and they’re each great in different ways: Spelunky for randomly generated roguelike madness, Guacamelee for crunchy combo-based combat, and Papers Please for making you feel horrible about your own morals. Take your pick. Regardless, you are probably going to have a great weekend. Glory to Arstotzka. And also hooray videogames!

Been waiting for Papers Please since hearing about it (waited for the final version). I’m really, really impressed with that game. The gameplay itself ramps up in unexpectedly thoughtful ways, the players motivations are perfect, and just to mention it, I don’t think most players will appreciate the degree of difficulty involved in making a game like that, and it’s very polished to boot. Hope it does well, he deserves it.

I enjoyed what I played of the Papers, Please demo a few months back but it kept hanging up when I reached a certain point. I’m sure that’s been fixed by now. Since the dev stated that a Linux version is planned, I’ll just wait for that one before laying down the cash.

With all the hype for it, I feel like I am missing some piece of information that generated that hype in the first place. I mean, from what I’ve seen, it’s just a 2D side-scrolling game? A bit like Cave Story, maybe? I mean, it’s probably nice and enjoyable, but everyone is talking about it as if it’s the next masterpiece of indie gaming, and I just don’t get it.

Yep. I think that’s because it is being supported by Steamworks feature as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, both the games I mentioned also got released over GOG and that fact was overlooked in this article pretty much.

GoG really got shafted on this one. Buying Papers, Please on the Humble Store gets you a DRM-free download, more money for the dev, AND a Steam key if you so desire. I think the same’s with Spelunky; I know it’s happened with several indie titles, like Kentucky Route Zero and Don’t Starve. There’s literally no reason to get these on GoG other than wanting to give GoG your money.

Spelunky was an instant buy from me, spent so much time playing the original version it seems only fair to give them my money at the first opportunity. It’s basically the same but it’s still bloody brilliant.

It’s also worth noting that, for the next week, if you purchase Guacamelee on Steam then you get Mutant Blobs Attack (at least in the U.S., not sure about anywhere else). I had never heard of the latter, but it’s quite a lot of fun.

I was actually quite excited about Papers Please until I saw a screen which appears to depict a woman going through a backscatter x-ray scanner? A shame, as I would’ve definitely bought it. I however refuse to support a game which promotes the illegal criminal practice of bathing travelers in cancer-causing radiation. Quite baffling to me how some people actually submit their children to these devices at airports with little to no protest as if they were themselves but sheep, blindly trotting off to the slaughterhouse…

It’s a period game, it’s set in the 80s in a fictionalised soviet bloc country. It has various other unpleasant things going on, too. Skyrim has beheadings in it, but I don’t think they were promoting it as a means of punishment.

And that is what they call a “knee-jerk reaction” – a hasty reaction to some keyword/trigger that is instinctive and usually bypasses all reason. Like, in this case, that the game depicts a totalitarian communist state.

“If 1 million people were exposed to 520 scans in one year, one study estimated that roughly four additional cancers would occur due to the scanner, in contrast to the 600 additional cancers that would occur from the higher levels of radiation during flight.”

We’d better ban planes too, just to be on the safe side. And also barbecues, gasoline and the sun.

While your comment is correct with regard to the original x-ray devices used by William Rontgen, modern scanners such as those at airport checkpoints use millimeter-wave imaging. Human skin emits electromagnetic energy in the 3-mm waveband, which is sufficient to produce an image and penetrate clothing. Unlike traditional x-ray machines, these have not been proven to cause tissue damage.

If you want to protest against the scanners from a privacy standpoint, by all means do so, but please don’t perpetuate these false claims regarding health risks. As Hodge points out, we’re exposed to radiation on a daily basis – modern scanners are in line with expected dosages.

You have to question the wisdom of a company who encourage people to submit games to their ‘popularity contest’ and when they win, release them all on the same day (or within a couple of days of each other) to cannibalise each other’s sales and dilute that initial “ooh – something new” period.

It’s like putting your daughter into X Factor and finding out the prize is them all singing different songs at the same time on the pub karaoke…

I’m not sure you can blame Steam for this one. Papers, Please was greenlit a long time ago and is being released everywhere, and I don’t think Guacamelee or Spelunky even went through Greenlight. Your criticism is true, just doesn’t apply to this particular situation.

I’m really torn about Papers, Please. It’s atmospheric and clever, it has neat sound design and art direction and all, but given that the gameplay revolves around a repetitive menial task it rapidly starts to feel like a gigantic chore. By the time I was about 3/4 of the way through the demo/beta/whatever, I was letting people through if their documents looked good enough and only flagging obvious problems, because I was just so bored of checking all the bloody things.

Not sure if it’s trying to make the point that working at such a job would be very tedious, but making the gameplay feel tedious seems a suboptimal way to do so.